Monday, November 04, 2013

WISE 2013 – Reinventing education

The World Summit on Education in Doha, Qatar brings together educators
from around the globe. They literally fly you in, put you up in a fine hotel,
feed you and let you rip. Networking here, and that is its strength, is as
global as you can get, as you’re guaranteed to speak to people from every
continent. It is arguably, as George Siemens says, “world’s most important
education conference”.‘Reinventing
education’ was this year’s theme, an admirable goal and badly needed as we know
that the Millennium goals will be missed, that the existing model is flawed,
costs too high and that demand is exceeds supply. So what happened?
As I said when I blogged the last WISE conference I attended
(this is my 3rd), “Education’s a slow learner - it
may be more accurate to say that education has learning difficulties. The
system is fixed, fossilised and, above all, institutionalised, so the rate of
change is glacial. People are, by and large, trapped in the mindset of their
institution and sector. In truth, small pools of innovative practice are patchy
and stand little chance of wide scale adoption. Many of the speakers repeated
platitudes about education being the answer to all of the world’s problems.
What they were short on were solutions. Education is always seen as the
solution to all problems. The problem with all this utopian talk is that it
dispenses with realism.”

4 pillars of education

The plenaries were, well, institutionalised, UNESCO, in my
opinion, have become part of the problem and low on solutions. They dominated
many of the sessions and regurgitated old reports, clichés and truisms, none
worse that their 4 Pillars of Education ‘to be, to know, to do, to live
together’. This is fine, but fails on a number of counts. ‘To be’ is a banal
abstraction that has no real purchase in education. ‘To know’ is an obvious
truism – of course education is about knowing – but knowing what? ‘To live
together’ is better but not best taught in school and classrooms. The last, ‘To
do’ is good but largely ignored as education gets ever more abstract and
academic, treating vocational learning as an afterthought. What we needed was
the Samson of innovation to push over the UNESCO pillars and enter the temple
of institutional thought to upturn a few tables that have been selling the same
tired, old stuff for decades. Sorry - I’ve mixed up two parables in one
sentence!

Morin – disappointing ‘discourse’

Morin opened the conference with an abstract, rambling
précis of his old UNESCO paper. He’s 92 and struggled to handle his notes and
microphone. It was stratospheric, a piece of French philosophy, totally detached
from the real world. It’s a type of ‘discourse’ (as French philosophers like to
call it) that remains rooted in dualist abstractions and dialectic, with the
occasional apercu. But this approach fails to deliver concrete ideas that one
could take away and apply in the real world. When asked for some real
suggestions and detail, he couldn’t and fumbled through with some more
discourse on ‘strategy’. Worse, it set the wrong tone for the summit. One of
abstractions and a failure to address real problems.

Literacy & numeracy

But things got much better with a hard hitting session which
delivered some surprises for me. First some brilliant insights from Helen
Abadzi, that around 18 our minds become less plastic and open to learning
literacies. You can learn the letters but it is difficult to see them come
together as words. You can experience this for yourself when you learn a new
language as an adult. As you rarely reach a reasonable reading speed, of around
60-80 words a minute, you forget the start of sentences before you’ve reached
the end. The implications of this research are huge, that we may be wasting too
much time and money trying to solve an insoluble problem. The second was that
the whole literacy push in Africa and the developed world is being thwarted by
poor textbooks and teaching. I have seen this for myself in Cambodia, where a
literally unusable textbook was being used in a country classroom. There was a
call for the abandonment of traditional ‘English’ and ‘Middle-class’ teaching
methods and texts for a literal ‘letter by letter’ approach in the local
language, which is rarely as irregular a English. When done well it takes
around 100 days. The other issue is teacher feedback, which is often poor and
misdirected in schools, focussing on the best not the worst performers in the
class. As for numeracy, it’s a different class of problem, as we are all born
numerate. New born babies are numerate but not literate. In truth this side of
the debate wasn’t covered at all.

Small-minded debate on Big Data

This session bordered on the bizarre. As one of the most
important current topics in education it deserved better. What we got were
idiosyncratic, personal and to be frank, not very informed, views on the
subject. John Fallon, of Pearson, was reasonably articulate and tried to keep
to topic, but the other three were amateurish. I saw one ‘analytics’ expert in
the room leave after 15 minutes.

For John Fallon we need to collect, analyse and interpret
data give opportunities to look at education like never before and transform
outcomes. We’re not short of data, it’s just that most of it is inputs such as spend,
enrolments, millennium goals, broadband connectivity and so on. As I always
say, to measure bums on seats is to measure the wrong end of the learner. Then
there’s the outcomes; PISA PIAC, high stakes tests, artificial once year
events. What we don’t use it for, said John, is to enhance learning. How do I
know what’s going on in students’ minds. Big Data needs to scale. Thousands of
individual interactions each and every day, across informal and formal
learning. He was the only one on the panel who had any real grasp on the
detail.

Divina Frau-Meigs, a sociologist, and self-styled activist
for media literacies (stretching the meaning of the word activist), gave an
idiosyncratic presentation based on her own flimsy research. At one point she
included drawing mindmaps on paper as Big Data. It’s called BIG data for a
reason. Her statement that it’s mostly dashboards and data mining missed the
point. Emilio Porta an economist from Nicuaragua was obsessed with global data
– UN, UNESCO, PISA and so on. He couldn’t see the flaws in having created a sort of arms race as the leaning
Tower of PISA data is hopelessly skewed. htp://buff.ly/1aCLCSb Politicians distort and
exaggerate these stats for their own ends. This was a very low level chit chat
about a complex and serious subject. I’m not sure that any of the panel had the
expertise to do it the justice it deserved.

Mindgraphs - Hans Rosling

Hans Rosling
has a great TED talk on the animation of statistics. But what matters is what
those statistics tell us. Rosling stunned us with his assertion that our common
perceptions about population, poverty and education are worse than that of
chimps! He did this with enthusiasm and humour.

What is the
global literacy rate?

80%

60%

40%

20%

(answer at
bottom)

Again and
again he showed us that our common perceptions are misconceptions. Population is
not increasing exponentially as birth rates have and are falling and the number
of children in the world has stopped growing.

On education he also scotched a few myths around figures
quoted by notables on the panels. What is worse, he asked POVERTY or GENDER in
education? Poverty is the clear answer. Above all, we no longer have developed
v developing nations but a range. Rosling should have been the opening keynote,
he set the tone for a proper debate, based on real figures.

What if Finnish teachers taught in your
schools?

Pasi Strahlberg posed a few questions to show that you must
tackle improving your educational system holistically. It is not JUST about
quality teachers, the mantra we so often hear. It’s a wide range of social
issues around scrapping the private sector, not rushing things and avoiding
early years ‘schooling’. Let them play until they’re 7 or 8. Don’t get
obsessive about testing. This flies in the face of almost everything we do in
education in the UK. We have become trapped in an arms race, where the solution
to everything is more ‘competition’, more ‘schooling’, more ‘league tables’ and
more ‘testing’. I also noticed that this was in direct contradiction to Julia
Gillard’s prescriptive ‘testing’ approach.

Monsters and misconceptions

This was a revelation, quick fire talks on all sorts of
topics and solutions, some good, some great, some awful. Let’s get the awful
stuff out of the way. The talk by the Observer journalist was an anecdotal rant
about how women rule the world and hapless men need to listen to them, as ‘men
can’t collaborate, women do’. This was a statement so general and awful that it
deserves a response. I played football nearly every night as a child, I’ve
managed companies, worked in teams and have little to learn from a hackneyed
journo, who has spent most of her life in solitary confinement typing out
articles on subjects to a deadline. She obscured an interesting point about the
feminisation of education in early years and primary by caricaturing men. OK,
got that out of my system.

To counter this, we had superb presentations on hard hitting
topics, like child marriages, self-sustaining schools in Uganda, MOOCs in China,
Amazigh education in Morocco and the Khan Academy. This quick-fire stuff needs
to be promoted and given more status, maybe themed. I particularly enjoyed the
iThra talk, about an after school science programme. He had a stunning quote, “The education system is a monster, by fighting
it we would have become monsters ourselves”.

Mozilla – tinker, share, make

Mark Surman showed us how to present. Face the audience,
stand up, look people in the eye, speak knowledgeably but from the heart, don’t
use notes and deliver a clear message. Compare this to Morin and others on the
many panels that delivered the same old platitudes. Motivate, engage and excite
learners. Get them to tinker, share and make things. It’s a learn by doing
model that allows young minds to understand the technological world in which
they live and use that technology to learn, do things and make things. What
gave his message clout was the fact that he was doing this through the Mozilla
Foundation, around the world, in Mozfests and Maker events.

Educators are always going on about 21st C skills. For Surman the 4th literacy is web
literacy, as the web is the new classroom, 21st century skills - 5 Cs (Classroom is
not one of them) communicate, create,
culture, collaborate, community on the WEB. These skills are not well taught in
schools and universities, where learners are herded into classrooms and lecture
theatres, online communication tools and devices often banned and creativity
rare, often squeezed by the obsession with STEM subjects. Educators are also always
trying to force storytelling. Young people tell stories daily - it's called
Facebook. Lifelong learning is Google, Wikipedia, Social networking and
YouTube - life is not a course it's informal learning.

MOOCs

Excellent input from the knowledgeable George Siemens and
the Chief Scientist for EdX. These guys know their stuff but the other two
participants clearly knew nothing about MOOCs and astonishingly, had never
taken a MOOC. How do I know this? I asked them and the chair. Neither had taken
a MOOC. They both spoke like amateurs because they were amateurs, trotting out
clichés about human interaction and drop-out without any grasp of the detail.
Siemens was clearly frustrated by their uninformed negativity and explained why
drop-out is not the problem people imagine it is, that pedagogy is varied and
evolving and that the experience is richer than people imagine and, above all,
people like them and use them. For the first time in 1000 years education that
delivers quality education to massive numbers, at low cost, that people want
and enjoy.

MOOCs are a wake-up call for Higher Education. MOOCs flip
universities. Siemens is right, MOOCs are a supply response to a demand
problem. We’ve seen more action in 1 year than last 1000 years and MOOCs will produce dramatic systemic and
substantial change. Certification is NOT the point in MOOCs - only 33% wanted
certification in Edinburgh MOOCs and there are plenty of ways they can be
monetised.

Human interaction is an issue but in the 6 MOOCs I've taken
this has been great - teaching seems intimate, peer-to-peer interaction strong,
forums lively and physical meetups possible. Siemens got a little tetchy when
drop-out was mentioned – rightly so. The sceptics seemed determined to look at
everything within the deficit model. What about the hundreds of thousands of
drop-ins? I’m absolutely amazed that so many have taken so many courses from so
many places. Online experience need not be inferior. As Siemens said, let's
hold classrooms and lectures to same standards as online!

There’s real fears around dominance by the private sector,
but if that delivers cheaper, faster, better education, so be it. In my opinion,
however, the future of MOOCs is: open platforms, open content, open pedagogies
and the opening of minds. African MOOCs may unlock a billion more brains HOOKs VOOKs - High school and Vocational MOOCs are also being delivered as this
is not just about HE and degrees. The MOOC session by far best at WISE talking
about real reinvention and a real phenomenon.

Conclusion

This is my third WISE summit, and as usual, I met some
amazing people. Thanks George Siemens, Mark Surman, Cathy Lewis Long, Derek
Robertson, John Davitt, Davod Worley, Jef Staes and all of the new people I met
in Doha. The Souk was a hoot (try the Iraqi restaurant there), the gala dinner
hilarious (the lack of alcohol made us almost hysterical) and on the rides on
the bus to and from the conference I had some of the best impromptu sessions.

Overall however, you can see the problem, a failure to engage with the real
problems head-on; costs, relevance, technology, that faculty and existing
teaching systems biggest barrier to progress in learning.86% of the delegates want
reinvention of education but time and time again the panels reflected and
reinforced old ideas and practices, with the audience clapping every time the
word ‘teacher’ was mentioned. Teachers matter, but until we recognise that
teaching is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for learning and look
for some other additional solutions, WISE will forever be focussing on the
wrong thing – teachers, not learners. The fear, that students may ‘manage to
learn without me’ and of technology in general, is holding us back. Next year,
less administrators, more innovators. The good news is that the Qatar Fundation
has been doing brilliant work across the globe and announced a focus on
innovation this year, with financial support for such innovation. They may be
on to something here.